An interesting set-up for fantasy adventure-but where’s the rest of the book?

On a wild frontier, where giant mammoths roam the plains and dragons soar overhead, each settlement is protected by a magical barrier.  Though most can learn some magic, the most powerful wizards are the seventh sons of seventh sons.  But if you’re going to have seven sons, you have to expect to have some daughters along the way.  Eff is one such daughter, the unlucky thirteenth child, and twin to the Seventh Son of a Seventh son.

I was familiar with Patricia C. Wrede through her Enchanted Forest Chronicles, which are delightful comedic skewerings of traditional fairy tale and fantasy stories.  Though her delightful sense of humour remains,The Thirteenth Child is a suprisingly dramatic book. Its great strength is in it’s depiction Effs deeply loving family-Wrede has captured the mixture of love and intense competition that exists in many sibling relationships.  The setting itself has a lot of potential, but it doesn’t have enough room to really stretch its legs, which brings me to the major problem with this book.

I’m a bit of a comics nerd, so you’ll have to hold with me for a moment-there’s an expression in comics called “writing for the trade”.  Comics are typically published in monthly single issues, and when a larger story arc is completed, it’s often published in a trade paperback.  ”Writing for the trade” means that a particular issue only will only make sense as part of that larger work.  It doesn’t have a complete dramatic arc of it’s own.

I bring this up because I feel it represents what’s “wrong” with The Thirteenth Child. After finishing it I felt like I had read the first third of a satisfying (if slightly slow-paced) fantasy novel.  A lot of sites list this novel with the subtitle “Frontier Magic:  Book 1” so I’m confident that sequels are on the way-and I’m sure they’ll be good-but I would have preferred a complete novel.

Grade Level:  8.6

Rating: ★★★ 1/2 (But wait for the collection)